Though the bunks were meant for only one shaauri apiece, they were just wide enough for two humans. Cynara lay down beside him, careful not to disturb his injured hand or touch his wounds. She pulled up the blankets and tucked her body against his side.
For a time he lay awake, savoring the uncomplicated joy of her nearness. But his limbs grew heavy, and he drifted into a half sleep filled with images of accusing human fingers pointed at him, faces contorted with rage, shaauri ears flattened and teeth bared to drive him from shaauri-ja forever.
“Ronan. Ronan, wake up.”
He opened his eyes to darkness. Cynara’s face, loving and beloved, replaced the cruel masks of his dreams.
“You had a nightmare,” she said, smoothing the damp hair from his forehead. “Sometimes it helps to talk.”
Talk, as if they lay together in a soft bed on a human world, mate and mate, with no concern other than unpleasant dreams. Ronan breathed out the lingering terror and shook his head. “They were only dreams.”
‘Then you should go back to sleep. I’ll be here.”
But he knew sleep would elude him. Just as the dreams were absurd and irrational, so was the desire Cynara awakened in his bruised and battered body. At least one part had been completely unaffected by the fights.
He cupped her face in his hands and kissed her tentatively, giving her the choice. Her answer could not be misinterpreted. When he began to roll her beneath him, she locked her muscles and stopped him.
“Your injuries,” she protested, wincing in sympathy. “You need—”
“I will be very careful,” he said, kissing the soft skin under her jaw. “I need you, Cynara.”
She released her breath and relaxed her muscles. “Yes.”
For a time Ronan only held her, and they exchanged gentle caresses, resisting the urgency that had driven them on Miklos’s yacht. Their fate was no more certain than it had been then, but Ronan knew, as Cynara did, that they would remain together until it was over.
Together they felt their way to a new tenderness, a healing of more than physical wounds or harrowing visions. They shed their shipsuits. The blankets hoarded their warmth and captured Cynara’s scent, distilling it to an intoxicating, seductive vapor.
Ronan tasted her skin, lingering at every slight variation of her body’s essence. She accepted his leisurely exploration without protest, responding with gasps and moans. She opened her mind, and he felt what she felt: not merely physical pleasure, but the very love she had professed at die cost of pride and security.
He tried to show her that her gift was not in vain. The fullness of his heart guided his hands and his mouth, caressing her breasts and her belly and the soft, fragrant place below. She signaled her readiness with nectar that flowed over his tongue, crying out when he licked her clean.
She grasped the hair at the nape of his neck and pulled him back to her mouth. “I want you, Ronan,” she whispered. “Now.”
He had never found a surer welcome. Her body enfolded him like an ocean of peace where time had no meaning. He moved, and she moved with him. He murmured words she could not understand, and she gave him the universe in the unsparing gaze of her blue eyes.
They were not gods, nor angels. Their shared humanity was the greatest gift that Cynara’s love had bestowed, and he could never repay her.
Completion came as softly as the loving. Cynara shuddered and sighed beneath him, her hands massaging the throbbing muscles of his back and shoulders. He remained inside her as long as he could, chest to chest and thigh to thigh. At last her eyes closed and her head sank into the pillow. He kissed her brow and tucked the blankets under her chin. Even in sleep her grip on him could not be broken.
He cradled her in the hollow of his curved body and tried to sleep. There were no nightmares.
Dawn came with the smell of an unseasonably late snowfall. Ronan worked his way free of Cynara’s arms and went to the shuttered window. The sky hung heavy with clouds; there would be concern among the an’laik’i field workers.